And uggghhh, can we please stop with the “rah! rah! so much oil!” news? If the past 10 years have taught us anything, it should be, yeah, there’s a lot of oil out there, but most of it isn’t profitable at $45/bbl. And if oil prices get high enough to make much of those 20 billion bbls profitable to get, then the economy tanks. It’s just not worth while to see these new oil estimates as making a huge difference.

Re: Cleme Manor Renovations
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@ Janak: For $141,000 per unit, we could set these people up in a new ex-urban home, albeit outside the city limits. At what price point would it just be cheaper to bulldoze this place and start from scratch?

They can’t make money at $80…no, $70, no wait $60, maybe $55. Yeah, that’s the limit. So we should definitely stop looking for new sources because nobody has been able to figure out how to extract it cheaper and more efficiently in the past 5 years.

Regarding Cleme Manor, any affordable housing rehab / development directly subsidized by HUD funds (as opposed to the LIHTC private sector developments where the subsidy is slightly less direct) is required to follow Davis-Bacon rules for construction wages. It’s a terrible, terrible requirement that leads to absurd cost numbers such as those highlighted in this comment thread.

We’ll never be oil independent at these prices. So given that oil independence isn’t economically viable, we need to look into alternatives to using oil, like electric automobiles and better/electrified rail service. It’s a simple strategy that we can do right now instead of betting on pipe dreams like hydrogen fuel cells, cold fusion, and dirt-cheap fracking.

@ Memebag
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Re: Cleme Manor refurb: I like your Jonathan Swift (“A Modest Proposal”) kind of thinking – if we make them into sausages, they can feed others while reducing the number of welfare-dependent people on the tax roll. A sweet virtuous cycle.
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As Jean-Luc Picard said: “Make it so.”

@Ross we have a massive fusion reactor that supplies us with massive amounts of uninterrupted energy for free. All we have to do is capture it.
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We can capture energy from this reactor called the “sun” in various ways:
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Concentrating solar power (CSP) that stores the sun’s heat in molten salt and can produce steam to drive turbines, even when the sun is down.
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Photovoltaic solar panels.
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Onshore and offshore wind turbines (wind is caused by solar heating)
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Geothermal and tidal power (the sun’s gravity gives us these)
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You could argue that oil ultimately was generated by solar power, but the time scale for creating oil is much too slow for our needs.
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The great thing about electrifying our transportation system is that our total energy use decreases. This is because internal combustion engines are so inefficient — we basically throw away 70% of the energy contained in the gasoline when we use it for driving cars. Electric motors are much more efficient.